We have received a cluster of comments over the last few days, several with overlapping contents. Rather than responding to each individually I thought I would provide a generalized response.
First of all we would like to apologize for any technical issues you may have had with our blog site and appreciate you letting us know. We have contacted our blog hosting provider and they have increased the amount of time allowed for our blog pages to load. If you continue to have technical difficulties let us know and we will do our best to resolve the issue.
Several have provided a range of comments with respect to our upcoming open houses, with a primary target surrounding the community of Bragg Creek. Some have indicated that open houses are a waste of time. Some want open houses but have requested it be held in Bragg Creek rather than Cochrane. Still others have indicated it is inconvenient for them to have to drive outside of Calgary to attend an open house and would prefer open houses to be held in Calgary. While it will be near impossible to accommodate everyone’s wishes, one take home message is clear. There is a big interest in our operations with respect to the Bragg Creek area. Given this, we are in the process of evaluating options for how we might further engage interested parties. We don’t yet have a definitive answer to what this might look like, but keep posted. It is a work in progress.
Another common theme from recent blog comments and emails is the request for an advanced digital distribution of our proposed harvest plans. We appreciate why these requests are being made however in the past it has also created a few problems. At present we are just in the process of finalizing the field work/ground truthing associated the plans development. As the field assessments occur modifications to the plans naturally arise. Advance distribution of draft plans will end up with a range of draft plans in the public domain. This has ended up creating confusion and has made it more difficult to discuss the end plan. Our intent is not to be secretive but things must occur in their proper sequence. We are targeting to have a plan available for viewing and discussion by the time of our open house and we are planning to post a link to it on our blog so everyone will have access to it.
Some comments have questioned whether logging is an appropriate activity for the area and that recreation should have a priority as a land use. This is a broader issue than what we can deal with as a company. Spray Lake Sawmills has been granted a Forest Management Agreement by the Crown and the area has been zoned as multiple use as per the Governments Integrated Resource Plan. We will be taking these as givens and have been developing our plans accordingly. If stakeholders would like to work with us to determine how we can best accommodate multiple use objectives for the area we are very happy to roll up our sleeves and see what we can do.